Photocircle.net prints now for sale!





Super excited to finally announce I have partnered with Photocircle.net in Germany and am selling some very special prints! Part of the profits will go to the social project of your choice. This blog post is in German for the moment grin emoticon
Prints are for sale now! Click here to visit my shop.

Photocircle.net

Yay! So happy to announce that I have partnered up with Photocircle in Germany to sell prints and crowd-fund some pretty amazing social causes. More info on the illustrator launch of the site coming soon. These are a few of the prints you will be able to find there:

 



MAMM Medellin

I went to our local modern art museum, El MAMM (Medellin) yesterday. Beautiful brand new facilities and lots of inspiration!
My favorite installation so far was the punctured fabric cosmos, Vagar por el universo, created by Dora Mejía.





Psychedelic Cephalopods

I've been so busy with GTS and unwinding from it these past several weeks! So I decided to go back to my Spoonflower challenges...it's been a while! This week's theme is Cephalopods. Yup. Octopuses? Octopi? These amazing tentacled creatures who live in ocean depths. There are about 800 species of cephalopods, so it's actually a very broad subject. I wasn't drawn to this challenge initially, quite frankly these guys aren't that good looking. So I figured I would try doing them with a technique I used to work with years ago: water and Parker ink. It's a very fluid and hard way to paint but the phenomenal thing about it is precisely that! You never know what it's going to turn out like. The way the ink mixes with the water gives you a surprise every time. So here's my inky take on these inky creatures.




Thoughts on not making it to GTS round 3 + Lilla Talking to Me in a Dream + Power of Intentions



The Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search finalists were revealed today! Congratulations to everybody, all 50 of us, who took so much time to create such different interpretations of the same brief. Yay! for all the 7 finalists, you guys must be ecstatic and very proud!

I want to tell you a little about what it means to "lose" and how I deal with it. We all wanted to win. Seriously, if you were in this competition you wanted to win. It's natural. But it makes me a little sad to see how some people call this one of their biggest defeats, and they cry and mope over not making it to the next round. I'm a firm believer that if it didn't happen, it's for a reason! Something better might be coming along. You simply needed to learn something from this experience. Whatever it is, let it go.

Like everybody else in the semi-finalist group, I didn't get much sleep last night. I tossed and turned, checked my email and refreshed the blog several times. 11:30 pm, 1:30 am, 2:00 am. I finally fell asleep. Then I had a dream where I saw Lilla and asked her if I had passed to the next round. She said no. I asked her if she could tell me something about the work I submitted, to which she replied "What do you think is new about it?". I said, "Well, the line work? The shapes?". She then said, "Give it a new voice". I woke up right after that, checked my phone, and the blog had just been refreshed. Go figure.

Oh man. Try to figure that one out. Anyway.

The other thing I wanted to share is the power of intentions. Setting intentions opens up the door to creating positive events in your life. Whether you set them through yoga (like I do) or simply sitting down and thinking of something that you want, it's interesting to explore. The intention I set for myself yesterday was to be in peace regardless of the GTS outcome. And I felt disappointed upon reading the results but I felt at peace. Here's a little article by Deepak Chopra and intentions.

It's all going to be OK. :)




Thanks! Gracias!

Thank you soooo much to everyone who voted for me in Lilla Rogers' Global Talent Search! I am forever grateful to each and everyone of you who voted, shared the link, called me, messaged me and just showed me love!!!!  Sin palabras para agradecerles el apoyo que me han dado durante la segunda ronda del concurso Global Talent Search de Lilla Rogers. Gracias a todo que votaron, compartieron el enlace, a los que me llamaron, escribieron y me mostraron tanto cariño!!!!!! 



Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search - Vote For Me!

I'm part of the 50 semi-finalists in Lilla Roger's Global Talent Search (over 1,000 entries have been submitted, 50 made it to the semi-finalists, 6 will make it to the finalists and 1 person will win two years representation from her studio!). Here's my piece for Round 2. The public gallery is now open and one person will be selected as The People's Choice. Please vote for me, it's super easy!!! Thank you!

http://lillarogers.com/wp-content/plugins/lilla-rogers-gts/viewimg.php?img_id=2781&post_id=22301


WeTransfer.com

Waking up to some really good news! My work from MATS A (week 2 - Home Decor) is being featured for three full weeks on WeTransfer.com! I can't say enough good things about MATS smile emoticon Just wanted to share with you guys, get your work out there, you never know what may happen! 

Sketchbooks

I have always admired artists who carry around beautifully organized sketchbooks with drawings and imprints of their daily adventures. It's important to keep track of the things you see and the ideas that pop into your head for sure! I have tried, but it can never really stick to doing it! So this weekend, I was sitting in my desk working and saw a pile of sheets of paper that I have been drawing on since I first took MATS A (Make Art That Sells With Lilla Rogers) and immediately thought...I actually have a kind of sketchbook to share with others! It's clearly a collection of my ideas, my thought process and it shows a nice progression of how my work comes to full fruition. So I figured why not create a virtual sketchbook to share and for me to see how my work grows and shifts through time. And here it is:


GTS - First Round Submission

My final piece for GTS. What an interesting experience, so many mixed emotions. So much time and hard work was put into this and that is what makes me the proudest. At the start of the assignment I had doubts....tons of them. And started doing icons and sketches in the style that I thought would please Lilla. Nothing came out feeling natural, it just wasn't me. After about three days of debating this madness in my head I talked to my husband, and to a wonderful MATS classmate (Adri!), and they basically told me that if I was doing this to try to win, to try to fit into Lilla's artist roster, then I was doing things wrong. And you know what? They were totally right. So I observed Antoinette's life, and kinda realized we had many things in common. Except for the pork chop thing. I let go, started to trust myself, my intuition, and things began to FLOW. So lesson learned. Be you. Don't try to copy, don't try to be somebody you are not. There is only one of you and that is just PERFECT. 


GTS and Pattern Bombing

These past two weeks have been INTENSE. I won a spot in this year's Global Talent Search (hosted by Lilla Rogers) so of course I had to take advantage of this amazing opportunity. It's been kind of nerve wrecking, there are hundreds and hundreds of super talented illustrators longing for that one coveted spot in Lilla's studio (two years representation! what?!). But now I have been able to relax and just take the experience as a learning experience.

The brief was superbly created. So much information, so much to think about. I have spent around 10 days working non-stop on this. My entire creative heart has been poured and I am really pleased with the results and quality of artwork I was able to produce. That's good enough for me!

The deadline is next Friday but I was able to organize my time wisely and finished yesterday. I submitted my image this morning. :)

Another exciting thing is going on right now, Make it in Design's global Pattern Bombing assignment! These are my two pattern bombs:



Getting psyched for Global Talent Search

GTS (Global Talent Search) is a super exciting event hosted by Lilla Rogers. She's on the lookout for new artists to represent! Thousands of people participate each year, so even if winning is by far a slim chance, it is an amazing opportunity to learn, grow, connect with artists and art directors, and reconnect with fellow MATS alumni! Let the games begin!


MATS (Make Art That Sells with Lilla Rogers) - My process, progress, and releasing old negative patterns.

It's been an intense past three weeks, to say the least, with MATS5 going on. Three weeks already! I was super fortunate to have been able to register for this year's MATS (Make Art That Sells - with Lilla Rogers) and it's been a fantastic experience. Make yourself a cup of tea ;) and join me.

This initial post will be an overall review of my experience and what I was expecting prior to starting the class. I will be posting more detailed posts with lots of pics from the illustration process and will probably make my first Youtube vlog explaining it all!

I remember being online about two months ago and perhaps bumping into one of the reviews from other blogs and was immediately intrigued. I started seeing this amazing quality and body of work of fellow MATS alumni and was absolutely blown away and frustrated. Why was I frustrated? Because in terms of my art I have always felt that everybody else can and has always "done it better". What ever that means! This sense of insecurity that plagues many of us is really limiting. Our mind limits us because we let it.

Let me further explain with something that you should know about me. I have been practicing hatha yoga on and off since I was a teenager. I started to get really passionate about my practice last year and started taking private lessons with a neighbor who happens to be an amazing yoga teacher. Less than two months into my practice together with her I was able to do my first headstand. A headstand! My world was turned upside down, literally, and as a result I got this immense sense of clarity. I realized at that moment that getting past the fear meant being half way there! You need some core strength to prop your legs up and lots of focus to stay in the pose, but loosing that fear, that stupid, self-imposed sense of "I can't do this, it's too hard, I will fall", made it EASIER.

This same "ah-ha!" moment happened to me with Lilla. Our Fairy Art Mother. Her course is so structured, to the point, well-designed, and practical, that when it's paired with her constant motivation, words of wisdom, that fear of "I can't do this, it's too hard, I will fail", made it easier to find my art-self in the process. I can say that for the first time in my 30-something years of art making, I am starting hone in on my style. I'm seeing it. And people are starting to see it as well. Amazing. All thanks to Lilla. I will be forever grateful to you, magical art lady.

Let me tell you a bit about how the course works. There are two sections, A and B. Each lasts 5 weeks. Each week covers a different market. So far we've covered Bolt Fabric, Home Decor, and Children's Books Illustration. The latter has been the most challenging but the most rewarding week so far. I've loved it all, but I really pushed my limits (mental, self-inflicted limits) and I am ecstatic for having done so. I will write a post for each week, but here's a recap of the work I have created so far. This will be short and sweet for today, but stay tuned because I will be discussing each week in depth. :)

Children's Book Illustration:










































Bolt Fabric:










































Home Decor: